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mental health
The Other Side of Opportunity: What Immigrants Contribute to US Institutions
We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement.
Feb 27, 2026
The US Department of Education recently withdrew its unlawful directive that would have restricted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and universities nationwide. The guidance was framed as an attempt to enforce “neutrality” in education. In practice, it would have narrowed how institutions identify and address inequity, discouraging efforts to create learning environments that reflect the realities of an increasingly global student population.
That national debate can feel abstract, just another skirmish in a broader culture war over higher education. But equity is not abstract. It lives in the quiet mechanics of institutions: who gets seen, who gets filtered out, and which barriers are treated as incidental rather than structural. I am reminded of this not by a court ruling or federal directive, but in the ordinary work of teaching and mentoring students from around the world as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It shows up during office hours, committee meetings, and the quiet moments when institutional rules do their work.
Americans are fluent in a familiar story about immigration: Immigrants come to the United States for opportunity—better education, better jobs, better lives. That story is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What is talked about far less is how immigrants improve the institutions they enter, often by exposing the limits of systems that were never designed with them in mind.
Case in point: Like many graduate programs, ours used procedures that filtered out applicants who had not paid an application fee before faculty review. When they failed to pay, I was never supposed to see their application. The fee, common by US standards, was prohibitively expensive in some local currencies. Until I learned about that procedure, I hadn’t fully appreciated how many judgments about who “belongs” in graduate school happen long before any evaluation of research potential or intellectual fit. Once I understood the implications of that policy, I advocated to have it amended, and a student I would never have otherwise met was later admitted and enrolled.
The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.
That experience crystallized something for me. The student’s presence highlighted how even well-intentioned programs can struggle to value ways of thinking they were never designed to account for. The student, meanwhile, navigated those gaps with a practicality that exposed where the system itself needed adjustment.
The same design logic operates across American institutions that confuse neutrality with fairness. Even institutions that are equity forward, including my own, must navigate a shifting and often constraining federal landscape, making progress real, but necessarily incomplete.
This kind of exclusion is not unique to admissions policies. Across higher education, international students routinely navigate US systems calibrated to financial, cultural, and administrative norms that quietly penalize difference. More than 1 million international students are enrolled in US colleges and universities, and an analysis from the Association of American Universities estimates that international students contribute nearly $44 billion to the US economy annually. Yet research consistently shows that international students experience higher levels of social isolation than their domestic peers.
From a public health perspective, these barriers are not incidental—they are risk factors that function as chronic stressors. Uncertainty around visas, financial precarity, cultural dislocation, and exclusionary policies shape mental health and academic persistence long before a student ever sets foot on campus. Research shows that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality among international students have risen sharply over the past decade, even as access to culturally responsive mental health services remains uneven.
In public health, we name these design failures plainly: policy choices—not personal deficits. Improving the experience of international students is less about individual support than about whether institutions are willing to change the conditions they create.
What struck me most, though, was not my student’s resilience in the face of these barriers, but what institutions gain when those barriers are confronted. They were adept at finding workarounds where institutions offered only walls—and unapologetic about pointing out the walls. That resourcefulness did not just help them navigate the system; it revealed where the system itself needed to change.
The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.
We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement. They expose inefficiencies, challenge inherited assumptions, and force clarity around what we actually mean by merit.
Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of the US healthcare workforce, including physicians, researchers, and direct-care providers—roles that are essential as the country grapples with workforce shortages and widening health inequities.
Opportunity is not a one-way transaction. Institutions that welcome immigrants while resisting the changes their presence demands are not neutral—they are extractive.
Some people change institutions not by asking for permission, but by refusing explanations that don’t make sense. The question isn’t whether immigrants benefit from coming to the United States—the evidence is clear. The more uncomfortable and more important question is whether institutions are willing to reckon with how much they benefit from immigrants, and whether they are prepared to change to welcome them.
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America’s ICE Crisis Is Political and Psychological
A society cannot remain mentally healthy when its members are repeatedly told not to trust what they see, feel, or know.
Feb 06, 2026
Following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, people are glued to their phones, televisions, and computer screens with both curiosity and dread. There is a pervasive feeling of unrelenting anxiety and fear. It creeps into otherwise ordinary moments, leaving people unmoored and unable to rest.
As therapists, we traditionally spend our time helping clients unpack what they are experiencing internally. But now, we are facing a moment when we don’t have to invest much in discovering what is causing that pervasive feeling of unease. It’s a collective experience causing individual pain.
There is a longstanding belief that therapy and politics should be kept separate, and that the treatment room ought to be sealed off from the chaos of the outside world. In quieter times, that is a reasonable expectation. But when fear, instability, and disinformation saturate the social atmosphere, pretending those forces stop at the therapy door becomes unrealistic and, at a certain point, irresponsible.
We are living through a period of sustained psychological assault. Constant chaos, relentless distortion, and the normalization of cruelty erode people’s internal sense of reality. When power is exercised without restraint or accountability, confusion and anxiety do not remain abstract. They show up as panic attacks, depressive collapse, insomnia, somatic symptoms, relational breakdowns, and despair.
It would be a mistake to minimize the pain people are experiencing right now or to underestimate how deeply it is shaping mental health.
This is not a partisan claim; it is a psychological one. When psychologically underdeveloped men become intoxicated by power, the effects are predictable and terrifying. Fear increases. Trust erodes. Nervous systems remain on high alert. People begin to doubt their own perceptions. Over time, this destabilization becomes chronic, not only for individuals but for the collective psyche.
Therapists are seeing this every day. Clients who once came to therapy for familiar struggles now arrive carrying an added layer of dread. People of color describe the fear of living in communities that feel increasingly targeted and unsafe. Protesters speak about the psychic toll of being criminalized for dissent. Immigrants and their families live with the constant anxiety of disappearance or deportation to foreign jails known as torture camps. Others describe something harder to name but no less corrosive—the sense that reality itself is no longer reliable.
Those outside the United States are not insulated from this either. When imperial powers posture and threaten, entire populations live in constant fear of destabilization or invasion.
History tells us that these cycles recur, and that eventually, they are resisted and reversed. However, that knowledge offers limited comfort to people living inside the rupture itself. It would be a mistake to minimize the pain people are experiencing right now or to underestimate how deeply it is shaping mental health.
What we call democracy in this country is valuable, but also deeply flawed. Systemic racism and a war on the poorest among us always have been standard fare.
But today, we seem to be entering a new phase where democratic norms are undermined openly and where cruelty is reframed as strength. When the truth is being treated as optional, the psychological cost is profound. A society cannot remain mentally healthy when its members are repeatedly told not to trust what they see, feel, or know.
This is where the fantasy that therapy exists in a political vacuum collapses. Policy decisions shape bodies, relationships, and futures. When people’s lives are destabilized by political forces, the reverberations show up in the quiet despair of the patient on the couch: What is happening? Why do I feel this way? What should I do?
Therapy is an act of reality restoration. It helps people reclaim their perceptions, reconnect with their values, and rebuild trust in themselves and others. Care, in this moment, is not passive. It requires naming harm, recognizing where terror is being manufactured and distributed, and understanding that the psychological health of a society depends on more than individual coping strategies. It depends on truth, accountability, and the protection of human dignity.
Therapists will continue to do what we have always done: Show up, listen carefully, and hold space for transformation. But we should not be asked to pretend that the storm outside has nothing to do with the distress inside. America’s crisis is not only political; it is psychological too.
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Alone for the Holidays? Blame Late Stage Capitalism
Loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Dec 29, 2025
The holidays can be the loneliest time of year, when isolation, family fractures, and economic strain become especially hard to bear. The shopping frenzy and glittery lights don’t substitute for real belonging—they often make its absence more painful.
Worse, many people blame themselves for not feeling the cheer. Scroll through Instagram or watch a holiday film, and it appears as though everyone else is finding love, meaning, and connection this holiday season. If you’re not, it’s easy to believe you’ve done something wrong.
But loneliness is not an individual pathology. It is a failure of how we have designed our economy, our politics, and our shared spaces.
Self-help culture offers some useful advice about boundaries, rest, and self-care. But it rarely acknowledges the larger truth: Loneliness is not something most people can solve on their own. The answer isn’t “retail therapy” or a vacation in Maui. It’s building belonging into our collective experience.
We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top.
That means addressing an economic system that systematically excludes growing numbers of people from security, dignity, and meaning. It means reclaiming political system that have been captured by moneyed insiders. And it’s creating the shared spaces—especially in-person spaces—where people are welcomed to contribute, be known, and find support.
How Did Isolation Get so Widespread?
For decades, we were told that rugged individualism was the path to success. We were expected to move for work, losing contact with extended family and friends, and compete our way to the top. Relationships were treated as less important rather than necessities. Capitalism required a flexible labor force, and we reorganized our lives accordingly.
At the same time, political participation has increasingly been reduced to fundraising. Those without wealth are invited to donate or volunteer, but many sense—accurately—that real power belongs to those who can write big checks. The rest of us have little influence over the decisions shaping our lives.
The places that once supported everyday connection have also eroded. Public squares, community centers, and informal gathering places have been replaced by commercial spaces designed for efficiency and extraction, not belonging. And the economy that once supported a middle class has been hollowed out by big corporations with little use for Midwest steel mills or family farms, leaving behind empty downtowns, shuttered factories, and frayed social ties.
During the road trip across the United States that led to my book, The Revolution Where You Live, I encountered small towns and urban neighborhoods that were quiet, even desolate. That experience stayed with me during a visit to Tübingen, a town in Germany, where I asked a friend about a strange noise drifting through the streets. She laughed. “That is the sound of people talking,” she said. The town square had been closed to traffic and was filled with market stalls, laughter, and neighbors greeting each other as they shopped for holiday gifts.
Design Matters
Today’s loneliness epidemic creates vulnerability. When people lack meaningful connection, they are more susceptible to groups that promise belonging, identity, and purpose—whether at political rallies or in online spaces. For some, belonging is created by excluding other identities and even spewing hate. Research suggests isolation can contribute to radicalization, though it does not determine it. Belonging can be mobilized toward many ends.
Isolation also takes a toll on physical and mental health, contributing to higher rates of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, depression and even dementia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What Would It Look Like to Design for Belonging Instead?
At a time of impending war, political extremism, climate crisis, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, this may seem like the least urgent question to ask. But moments of upheaval are also moments of reinvention. The direction we take depends in part on whether people feel they have a place, a voice, and something to offer.
Designing for belonging starts with economic participation. Workplaces and businesses can be designed to offer participation, dignity, and a shared stake through cooperatives, employee ownership, and models that reward contribution rather than extraction. We can stop giving tax breaks and head starts to corporations that drain communities, and leave behind pollution and unemployment. Instead we can support enterprises with long-term commitments to place: those that make food, housing, healthcare, and childcare affordable and rooted.
People power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible.
It also means rebuilding shared spaces—places where people can simply be, or sing, talk, trade, make art, share food, teach, and support one another. Inviting places where people come to get to know those of different races, generations, ways of life—and where fear and prejudice lose their grip simply because people are no longer strangers.
Political and social movements can use language that invites people in as collaborators, not just donors or spectators. Belonging that is at the center of our work can counter the burnout that plagues so much civic and social change work. When people experience the dignity of having something to offer, the sense of community and mutual support can make participation as joyful as a good party
Belonging may feel like a squishy topic at a time of authoritarianism, war, and corporate dominance. But people power grows out of connection—the some force that carries us through disasters and makes collective change possible. Connection and belonging are easy to overlook when they are present, but when they are missing, our health, sense of purpose, and optimism suffer. Authentic connections are sources not only of well being but of power—and together they form the foundations for a better, more inclusive world.
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